“Oh crapsticks…” Fatima’s hand blurred as she selected the scanners to magnify the picture of her friend’s ship on the desk-screen.
There was the Esther, still exuding gas and bits of scrap metal, but she was slowly starting to spin on her axis as her haulage hold doors had only opened a few meters—not the ten or so meters required for proper deployment. As Jezzy watched, she saw the Esther firing her positioning rockets to keep out of the enlarging debris field that they had created.
All the other tugs had flown safely away from the mess that they had created. That had been the trickiest part of the whole procedure, Jezzy and Fatima knew. She had needed experienced tug pilots to be able to leave the manmade asteroid field as soon as they had created it and before the spiral dynamics of vacuum-objects saw the bits of metal colliding with their own ship!
“Try the manual override!” Ahmadi was saying urgently as the Esther turned back the other way, narrowly avoiding being hit by a large shard of external ship plate.
Behind them, the Ru’at jump-ships were remaining stubbornly inactive, as if they were amused by this palsied effort of humanity to stand in their way.
Ahmadi zoomed in more, and the close-up image of the Esther’s partially-opened hold doors grew on the desk as Fatima fought to keep the cameras trained on the twisting tug ship.
“Joe. You got a blockage. Starboard front corner. Something’s jammed against the door pistons!” Ahmadi was saying, and the image showed a chunk of scrap metal that hadn’t rushed out of the hold as it should have done but had somehow become wedged against the large pistons that opened and closed all hold doors.
“What? I’ve still got a half-full hold. I can’t fly out of here like this— TZZRK!”
Suddenly, the large image was knocked out of view, and Joe’s incoming message snarled into static.
“Joe! Joe, come in! Repeat: Esther, respond to hail!” Ahmadi was shouting down the archaic microphone that these old tugs were equipped with. Jezzy looked out of the cockpit window to see that the Esther had slumped to the side, its front maw still losing debris at a slow rate, but there was now also a plume of gases from the far side, turning the tug over and over.
“Joe!”
“TZZZK” I’m okay, boss… I got hit by some of the debris. I’m losing atmosphere!” Joe’s shouted.
Oh no, Jezzy thought. She had known that this might be a possibility, that the tug drivers themselves would be performing a very tricky and exacting maneuver. Fatima had assured her that her pilots were good enough.
“Do they come equipped with escape pods?” Jezzy asked in horror, one eye still on the motionless ships. This was not how she wanted her first exercise in command to go, with the sudden and senseless death of a civilian.
“Yes, but that would be a bad idea…” Fatima was already pulling levers and firing her own positional rockets to rise high above the debris field, arcing towards the front line. “As soon as Joe’s escape pod fires, it’s bound to hit some of that wreckage. It might survive, but those things don’t have any navigational abilities. They just automatically fly to the nearest safe harbor.”
Which would be the Last Call, Jezzy saw—only now there was an ever-widening debris field between the two.
“He’s going to be safer inside the Esther. These tugs can take a good deal of battering before they give up the ghost.”
KER-THUNK! As if to prove her point, the Ginkgo shuddered as a piece of scrap metal ricocheted over its hull.
“But leaving him out there would mean that he is the first in line when the Ru’at attack.”
“I’ll go. Did I see a harness down there?” Jezzy was already moving back to the ladder, heading back to the long equipment room where a couple of the large, bulky belted backpacks had been hanging up. A harness was basically the same as a battle harness that the Marines wore, but they were external to whatever suit that the worker wore, clipping over their protective gear and strapping over their shoulders. From each backpack there extended tiny positioning rockets, and above the shoulders extended two long, spider-like legs with multiple joints, at the end of which were grabbing vices.
Jezzy had never used one, but she had seen them being used. They couldn’t be that much different from the jump-packs that she had worn on Mars, could they? She knew that these harnesses were used the Confederacy over by starship engineers to perform exacting welds and work that required close, non-automated attention. The vice grabbers on the ends of the shoulders could hold tools or brace the flier against the vessel they were working on, and their positional rockets would make sure that they could travel to and from their mothership with ease.
“Have you ever used one before!?” Ahmadi was shouting after her, even as Jezzy shrugged one over her own power armor. It barely fit, but when it did, at least her armor compensated for it easily.
“No, but I don’t think we have much choice, Ahmadi. I need you in here flying the Gingko and ready to pick me up when I get back with Joe!”
She heard a loud grumbling shout from above her as she secured the final strap.
“But the debris field— Any random piece could take the pair of you out just as easily as the escape pod!” Ahmadi argued.
“It’s our best shot. I’ve got more chance of avoiding the wreckage like this and you know it.” Jezzy turned and hit the airlock decompression button before stepping in. As the door cycled to a close behind her, she stood in the dark and wondered if Ahmadi would okay the door release command at all if she disagreed so mightily, but there was a blink of orange and green lights and the outer door opened.
WHOOSH! The residual atmosphere in the chamber forced Jezzy out at speed—straight towards a rising length of silver cable.
Frack! She grabbed the belt controls and fired the tiny positioning rockets on the underside of the harness backpack, turning and spinning her body so that she swam past the steel cable before it could tangle with her.
“You’re a fool, Lieutenant Wen,” she heard Ahmadi say over the suit telemetries.
She’s probably right, Jezzy thought as she fired the rockets in tandem to swerve and loop around the next spinning piece of tubing, a bulkhead door, an unrecognizable piece of slag metal…
But I can’t let this civilian die. I can’t let that be the hallmark of my command, Jezzy was thinking as she cast a look ahead of her. The Ru’at ships still hadn’t done anything yet and were just hanging there, motionless. She wondered if they were the ones waiting to be attacked.
“Lieutenant Wen! This is Faraday. What’s happening out there?” burst in the angered tone of Colonel Faraday’s voice. Jezzy knew that he should still be standing on the bridge of the Oregon, where it was stationed between the debris field and the Last Call.
“Mission of mercy, Colonel, sir!” Jezzy shouted back as she fired the right rocket to make her swerve past a spinning girder the thickness of her arm.
“Mercy? Lieutenant? This is a time of war! I have mines loaded and ready to fire, but I can’t with you flying through the middle of the battlefield!” he responded, if not with outright anger, at least with obvious annoyance.
“It’s something I have to do, sir,” Jezzy said, “There’s a civilian caught in the field. I can’t let him die without a gun in his hand.” And that, at least, appeared to be something that the colonel understood.
“I have the firing plan that you suggested locked in and will be firing as soon as you’re clear.”
“Affirmative, Colonel, sir!” Jezzy said, flying through the debris field that she herself had orchestrated.
It was far easier to negotiate the revolving bits of metal like this, Jezzy thought. It was like diving, if anything, she thought. She would fire her rockets to make a clean run through a ‘bare’ patch of space before ‘landing’ on the edge of a piece of metal and pushing off, leap-frogging from one piece of spinning wreckage to another.
And still, the Ru’at jump-ships didn’t make a move.
What are they waiting for? Jezzy wondered a
s she suddenly flew through a shimmering field of washers and bolts.
She heard drumming all over her suit and faceplate as the tiny bits of metal drummed across her body like solid rain. None of them were traveling fast enough to do her power armor any harm, of course, but she still retracted the harness’s positioning rockets all the same until she had broken through to the other side.
Not that I’m not glad that the Ru’at haven’t attacked yet… she thought as she fired up the harness once again to swoop under a large piece of hull plate. She saw the spinning Esther ahead of her.
Which was now spewing gases from several places across the metal rhomboid of its body, and whose hull had clear heavy scratches and dents across it.
“Ahmadi? I’m there. Patch me through to the Esther,” Jezzy said.
“I read you, one, two, connecting and here—” The sergeant heard the glitch and hum of connections before the now-familiar voice of Joe greeted her.
“Here comes the cavalry! Am I glad to see you!” Joe said. He sounded gruff, stressed, and scared.
“Situation report. What’s happening over there, Joe?” Jezzy started to tap the rockets of her harness so that she scooted forward gently towards the shaking, revolving ship ahead of her. “Can you get to an airlock?”
“Fuh-freezing in here, Lieutenant.” Joe’s voice shook and trembled. “The impact must have taken out life support. I’m in my encounter suit, but these things have only got forty-five minutes of oxygen…”
“How much atmosphere you got in the Esther?”
“We’re at…uh…two percent…” Joe didn’t sound very pleased at all. Which wasn’t enough to last more than about twenty minutes, Jezzy quickly calculated. But it was plenty of time for what she had in mind.
“We’ll get you out of there before then, Joe, don’t you worry. I want you to get to the airlock and wait for my signal,” she said, seeing the hexagonal dome of the external bulkhead door swing past her and around again.
“But how am I going to release the door? There won’t be anyone in the cockpit!” Joe said, alarmed.
Oh, fracksticks. Why didn’t these tugs have the same level of sophistication as the Marine Corps ships!? She could have screamed, but she didn’t. Marine Corps ships had multiple redundancies built into them. For all their thuggish utilitarianism, the Marine Corps airlocks could be operated by the suits of those waiting inside or outside.
“Okay, I’ll come to you then. All airlocks have external controls, right?” she said, half-asking the question rather than stating it. She knew that all Confederate airlocks were supposed to have external opening and closing controls for emergencies.
The engineers probably hadn’t imagined this situation, Jezzy thought.
“It’s got external mechanical locks. You’ll have to break the seal and turn the wheel counter-clockwise,” Joe said. “There are pressure converters, but it’ll still open with a punch.”
“Not if you run through the full decompression process on your end, Joe,” Jezzy reminded him. “Get to the airlock now, Joe.”
“Aye-aye, Sergeant.”
Swoop. The airlock hatch swept past Lieutenant Wen’s view once again, before the Esther was shaken by another impact to its front and circled wildly.
The Ru’at ships still weren’t attacking, Jezzy realized, which was a good thing, but also insensible. What were they doing? Just sitting there until General Asquew could send more of the Rapid Response Fleet here to blow them out of the sky?
Jezzy didn’t doubt for a moment that the entire weight of the Rapid Response Fleet could destroy these vessels. There were only fifteen of them, right? And the Rapid Response Fleet alone had six or eight times that number of vessels, of all different classifications from one-Marine fighters all the way up to the giant flagship dreadnaughts.
Only fifteen. Her memory did the mental equivalent of sucker-punching her in the gut.
General Asquew’s footage of the departing Ru’at jump-ships that had been shown to Jezzy on board the Oregon had shown about thirty of the enemy vessels.
Where did the other half go? Jezzy thought in alarm. She was already gesturing for her suit communicator to activate when she saw small flashes of light out of the corner of her eye.
Flashes of light that were not coming from the Esther in front of her, or the scrap wreckage field behind her.
It was coming from the Ru’at fleet—or half of it, anyway.
Tiny explosions of light across the face of the strange cylindrical vessels. Jezzy gasped. “Are they firing at us?” she called out on her command frequency. It had looked like muzzle flashes from a distance, but there was no accompanying hail of projectiles, missiles, or torpedoes lancing into the Esther and her. Instead, the lights flared, diffused, and winked out just as if she was looking at lights, not down the barrels of ship-mounted guns.
Were they trying to send a message to us? she thought, until she saw precisely what the lights had meant. Small dark shapes were flying through the night—straight for the asteroid field.
The Ru’at had indeed decided to send a message, but their message was the flying bodies of cyborgs, metal on one side, and dead, blackened flesh on the other.
And they were coming straight for the Esther, and for Acting First Lieutenant Jezebel Wen.
12
Not Entirely True
“Lieutenant,” Ambassador Ochrie hissed from where she stood in by one of the bistro’s porthole windows. Every line of her body was tight as she peeked out past the curtains.
So far, the wanted Marine, ambassador, and imprimatur had spent the last several hours enjoying the strong coffee of the Greek restaurant as they tried to figure out their next move. Despite their sudden imposition, and the fact that they brought with them the threat of General Hausman’s Marine guards breaking down the door at any moment, Max Poulanous and his son Alexi had appeared to be nothing but generous to them, and currently, the pair sat at one of the dining tables with Rhossily, who was trying to teach Alexi a game of chance.
“Lieutenant!” Ochrie repeated urgently.
“What have you got?” Solomon stepped up to her side, leaning to look through the gap in the curtains to see what troubled the ambassador.
Marines. They were outside, moving down the hallway in their power armor, their Jackhammers slung across their chests. Solomon’s eyes narrowed.
The Marine of Hausman’s force—who Solomon presumed had to be members of the Near-Earth Fleet, just as he was a member of Asquew’s Rapid Response Fleet—wore the same armor that he did, but their colors were gold and red, and their belt harnesses seemed to have less of the battlefield-minded Rapid Response accoutrements, with less rope deployments or medi-kit modules. Instead, these Marines had more lines of flashbang grenades and handcuffs.
“Hausman’s building a private police force,” Solomon murmured, watching as they sauntered down the corridor, past the closed doors of adjacent shops.
“A private police force that will have us executed the first chance he has!” the ambassador said. A Luna-wide curfew had gone up across the station since the New York attack, and there was an eerie quiet outside their walls.
“Hush,” the ambassador said, stepping back from the curtain as Hausman’s Marines stalked past, policing the curfew. At the dining table, the imprimatur and the others caught wind of what they were saying and fell into an uneasy silence until Solomon checked the curtains once more and saw the retreating backs of Hausman’s guards.
“We’re good,” he breathed, hearing the audible sigh of relief from all those around him.
“We need to get off the Moon,” the ambassador whispered to Solomon.
“Aye,” he agreed. I need to let Asquew know just what is going on back here. Solomon knew that it would take hours, at least, for radio news to reach Mars about New York, and Hausman. Hours during which time the Ru’at would have appeared, and Asquew’s offensive of Mars would already be well underway. He thought about what he had seen in Luna 1’s docking s
tations. “We might be able to steal a ship. It’d have to be civilian maybe, as I don’t think we could get a Marine Corps ship…”
“But then, how would we jump?” the imprimatur pointed out. “All of the ships near Earth have been grounded or are in holding patterns. No one is allowed to enter or leave near-Earth space.”
“That is not entirely true…” Max cleared his throat and spoke up.
“What? Do you know a way to get off the station?” the ambassador asked suddenly.
“Well…” The restaurateur grinned broadly. “That depends on who’s asking.”
“Are you sure about this?” Ambassador Ochrie still managed to look fierce, even behind the heavy gray cowl she wore over her head. The imprimatur was similarly garbed, but, despite Max’s protestations, Solomon had refused to leave his power armor behind. Instead, they had changed their plan to this: that Lieutenant Cready would pretend to be one of Hausman’s guards, escorting subversives…and hope to note run into any of Hausman’s Marines who could see his ID.
Solomon walked down the long, empty access tunnel with Max behind him, his hands held together with a length of rope that wasn’t actually tied, and behind him came the ambassador, cowled and fake-tied, and then Imprimatur Rhossily, similarly adorned.
“Nothing is ever certain, madam,” Max said, still with his characteristic trace of energy and optimism, but his voice did sound a little strained. “But I have been living in Luna 1 for a long time… Me and some of the other local tradespeople, we have, you could say, developed a few small ways to make sure that goods are easily available…”
“Smugglers, you mean,” the ambassador said dourly.
“Ambassador, I hardly think that any of us have the luxury of choosing our allies.” Imprimatur Rhossily said.
If they WILL even become our allies… Solomon thought as he saw their destination, the distant airlock of Port 13, one of the smaller bubble habitats to the rear of the larger Luna 1 bubble, and apparently just as deserted.
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